


i said i would be caesar, or nothing at all

by noahfronsenburg



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Graphic Description, M/M, May/December Relationship, Night Terrors, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shadowhunter Tell Alphinaud The Truth Challenge, no betas we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 10:32:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16952367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noahfronsenburg/pseuds/noahfronsenburg
Summary: The smell of burning ceruleum wakes him.





	i said i would be caesar, or nothing at all

**Author's Note:**

> everyone gaius has ever cared for has either died or been exiled from home forever and may as well be dead and it's entirely because of him! good going, asshole! 
> 
> dont @ me but yes this was partly an exercise entirely in "gaius wanders around shirtless being emo"
> 
> title from [caesar by typhoon](https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/typhoon/caesar.html)

The smell of burning ceruleum wakes him.

 

 

Within moments, he is out of his bedroll, stumbling out of his tent, gunblade drawn, panting, wide awake, sweat pricking his hairline. Fight or flight, bile in the back of his throat, panic rising in him like an inexorable tide. Where is he smelling it—where’s the fire—what has caught. How fast do they need to run? His eyes are searching the horizon line, nostrils flared, as the scarring on his left hand aches and throbs in time with the beat of his heart.

It takes him a long time to realize that there is no blazing inferno.

There are just his companions, seated around the campfire. Staring at him. And why should they not; a grown man half-naked in the Garlemald cold, holding a blade as if to fight spectres?

For a moment, none of them move. “It’s the last of the gunpowder on the armor,” someone says, but he can’t tell who past the pounding in his ears and the dryness in his mouth. He’s panting. His fingers and toes feel cold. “It’s burning off. We were melting it down for bullets.”

Without another word, he turns and walks away, barefoot, shirtless, not thinking, not making any plans, just walking, _Heirsbane_ propped over his shoulder. His feet follow something like a path, back across well-trodden grass, and the cold of the Garlean night starts to seep into his body after maybe fifteen minutes. He only begins to regret missing a shirt when he reaches a small copse of trees not far enough from the camp to be totally out of the firelight, and crosses through them to find himself atop a small rise.

Far away to the northwest, he can see lights, polluting the skyline. Deep in the valleys beyond where he now stands, there is society, that which he has eschewed. Existence. Another world, another life, another chance. Pounding, pulsing with ceruleum. _Ceruleum_. The power that drives the Empire. The power that laid him low, brought him here.

He stands there, jaw grit against the cold wind, his skin all covered in goose pimples, nipples hard with cold. It’s absurd, the minutiae that exist, that affect him—that this cold can do less harm to the mind that ticks inside him than the imagined scent of gunpowder. Eventually, he sits down, _Heirsbane_ set on the ground beside him, and he wraps his arms around his knees, stares into the distance.

Footsteps approach, after some long time of silence; long enough his jaw aches with his refusal to let his teeth chatter. Dirt crunches, and he does not look up before a blanket is unceremoniously dumped over his head. It takes him long enough to disentangle it from his head that Alphinaud has sat down beside him, and presses into his space without a care in the world, pulling the blanket around both of them and leaning into his arms like he belongs there. The younger man passes him a thermos, the insulated metal warm with whatever is inside. “Coffee,” Alphinaud says. “It was what we had that was hot.” He opts for grunting his thanks, and takes it, holds it between his palms to let the heat sink into his body by ilms, the scarring on his left forearm aching in the cold and the wind, blown raw by exposure.

It is only begrudgingly that he shifts, crossing his legs, so that Alphinaud can tuck up under his chin, pull the blanket tight around both of them, their body heat shared. Like this, wrapped around Alphinaud, warm inside the blanket, it cuts a little of the cold wind that blows outside—and just as much as that which blows within.

He pretends he doesn’t lean his chin atop the younger man’s head, nose buried in thick white curls. Shuts his eyes, for just a moment, as Alphinaud pulls his left hand around his chest, and rubs feeling back into the scar tissue with silent fond regard. Alphinaud is so small; slight and willowy, but the muscle under his suit is undeniable, built from years honing his skills in combat. Combat which only had to happen because of _what he did_.

Another child, another battlefield.

“I can hear you thinking,” Alphinaud says, softly. He makes a quiet noise in response, takes a sip of the coffee, and shuts his eyes again just to listen to Alphinaud’s breathing. “What is turning your mind so in circles, old man?” There is a fondness to the chiding, a reminder of well-worn care that has become so regular in their short months travelling together. There are few indeed who would be willing to test his ire in the way that Alphinaud does; he is unsure as to if it is some kind of revelation of shared affection, or if it is simply just sheer bullheadedness.

“Old memories,” he murmurs. “Things best left forgotten.” Burned flesh. Charred ceruleum. Blood on durasteel; bile in the back of his throat, throbbing in the recesses of his skull ringing with concussive fire. Fire. So much fire. Alphinaud’s fingertips still against the underside of his wrist, his thumb pressed to the pulse point there, as if he can listen in on those selfsame thoughts. “Nothing you need concern yourself with.”

“How much do you know of Eorzean politics these days?” Alphinaud asks, and it is so abrupt a change of subject that it takes a moment for his brain to understand it. “Of what happened since you decamped?”

“Little and less.” He’s not had the stomach for it. The last he saw of Eorzea’s shores, he was hardly alive, most of his body covered in burns, barely cogent. He doubtes very much that he’ll ever see that land again. “Why do you ask?”

“I still dream of the night that they chopped off General Aldynn’s arm,” Alphinaud replies, and he can feel something sinking heavy deep inside him. “It was my fault, you know. It feels like forever has passed between now and then, even in just a handful of years. I look back on myself and see a naïve idealist, dedicated to doing what only I thought was right. I thought,” Alphinaud says, and there is no small irony wry in his voice, “That only I could save Eorzea.”

“And?” He prompts, almost not wishing to know, taking another sip of the coffee and letting Alphinaud pull it from his hands, doing the same. “How did that end? In smoke and ashes?” _As did mine?_

“In blood.” Alphinaud’s voice is carefully neutral, devoid of tone, frozen. “It ended in blood. The Sultana nearly killed, Raubhan lost his arm, and the Scions scattered and lost, or worse. Minfilia—“ his voice chokes off, gone silent for a moment. “She shall never come back,” he murmurs at last. “Because of me. For my decisions. My foolishness caused so many to suffer. Good men, _better_ men than I, have died for my mistakes.

“There is no shame in being haunted by it.”

It is strange to him, how often the men who are younger than him again by half speak wisdom. Perhaps it is due to the world he helped to create, but they know a great deal more than he did, when he was their ages. Perhaps even more than he does now.

“No ghosts,” Gaius says at last, his fingers curling around the thermos, nails digging into the metal. “ _Fear_.”

Alphinaud’s hand on his cheek stills him. “There is no shame in that,” he says, “either.”

Alphinaud kisses him, chin tilted up from out of the blankets, and he forgets, for a moment, the scent of charred flesh, and the pulsing reminder that the bed he now lays in he made himself, lost in the reassurance of silent regard.

**Author's Note:**

> twitter/social media @jonphaedrus


End file.
